no support to the notion that men have fallen from a higher to a lower
state. On the contrary, everything points to a slow natural evolution;
which, favoured by the surrounding conditions in such localities as the
valleys of the Yang-tse-kang, the Euphrates, and the Nile, reached a
relatively high pitch, five or six thousand years ago; while, in many other
regions, the savage condition has persisted down to our day. In all this
vast lapse of time there is not a trace of the occurrence of any general
destruction of the human race; not the smallest indication that man has
been treated on any other principles than the rest of the animal world.
10. The results of the process of evolution in the case of man, and in that
of his more nearly allied contemporaries, have been marvellously different.
Yet it is easy to see that small primitive differences of a certain order,
must, in the long run, bring about a wide divergence of the human stock
from the others. {47} It is a reasonable supposition that, in the earliest
human organisms, an improved brain, a voice more capable of modulation and
articulation, limbs which lent themselves better to gesture, a more perfect
hand, capable among other things of imitating form in plastic or other
material, were combined with the curiosity, the mimetic tendency, the
strong family affection, of the next lower group; and that they were
accompanied by exceptional length of life and a prolonged minority. The
last two peculiarities are obviously calculated to strengthen the family
organisation, and to give great weight to its educative influences. The
potentiality of language, as the vocal symbol of thought, lay in the
faculty of modulating and articulating the voice. The potentiality of
writing, as the visual symbol of thought, lay in the hand that could draw;
and in the mimetic tendency, which, as we know, was gratified by drawing,
as far back as the days of Quaternary man. With speech as the record, in
tradition, of the experience of more than one generation; with writing as
the record of that of any number of generations; the experience of the
race, tested and corrected generation after generation, could be stored up
and made the starting point for fresh progress. Having these perfectly
natural factors of the evolutionary process in man before us, it seems
unnecessary to go further a-field in search of others.
11. That the doctrine of evolution implies a former state of innocence of
mankind is quite true; but, as I have remarked, it is the innocence of the
ape and of {48} the tiger, whose acts, however they may run counter to the
principles of morality, it would be absurd to blame. The lust of the one
and the ferocity of the other are as much provided for in their
organisation, are as clear evidences of design, as any other features that
can be named.
Observation and experiment upon the phenomena of society soon taught men
that, in order to obtain the advantages of social existence, certain rules
must be observed. Morality commenced with society. Society is possible only
upon the condition that the members of it shall surrender more or less of
their individual freedom of action. In primitive societies, individual
selfishness is a centrifugal force of such intensity that it is constantly
bringing the social organisation to the verge of destruction. Hence the
prominence of the positive rules of obedience to the elders; of standing by
the family or the tribe in all emergencies; of fulfilling the religious
rites, non-observance of which is conceived to damage it with the
supernatural powers, belief in whose existence is one of the earliest
products of human thought; and of the negative rules, which restrain each
from meddling with the life or property of another.
12. The highest conceivable form of human society is that in which the
desire to do what is best for the whole, dominates and limits the action of
every member of that society. The more complex the social organisation the
greater the number of acts from which each man must abstain, if he desires
to do that which is best for all. Thus the progressive {49} evolution of
society means increasing restriction of individual freedom in certain
directions.
With the advance of civilisation, and the growth of cities and of nations
by the coalescence of families and of tribes, the rules which constitute
the common foundation of morality and of law became more numerous and
complicated, and the temptations to break or evade many of them stronger.
In the absence of a clear apprehension of the natural sanctions of these
rules, a supernatural sanction was assumed; and imagination supplied the
motives which reason was supposed to be incompetent to furnish. Religion,
at first independent of morality, gradually took morality under its
protection; and the supernaturalists have ever since tried to persuade
mankind that the existence of ethics is bound up with that of
supernaturalism.
I am not of that opinion. But, whether it is correct or otherwise, it is
very clear to me that, as Beelzebub is not to be cast out by the aid of
Beelzebub, so morality is not to be established by immorality. It is, we
are told, the special peculiarity of the devil that he was a liar from the
beginning. If we set out in life with pretending to know that which we do
not know; with professing to accept for proof evidence which we are well
aware is inadequate; with wilfully shutting our eyes and our ears to facts
which militate against this or that comfortable hypothesis; we are
assuredly doing our best to deserve the same character.
I have not the presumption to imagine that, in {50} spite of all my
efforts, errors may not have crept into these propositions. But I am
tolerably confident that time will prove them to be substantially correct.
And if they are so, I confess I do not see how any extant supernaturalistic
system can also claim exactness. That they are irreconcilable with the
biblical cosmogony, anthropology, and theodicy is obvious; but they are no
less inconsistent with the sentimental Deism of the "Vicaire Savoyard" and
his numerous modern progeny. It is as impossible, to my mind, to suppose
that the evolutionary process was set going with full foreknowledge of the
result and yet with what we should understand by a purely benevolent
intention, as it is to imagine that the intention was purely malevolent.
And the prevalence of dualistic theories from the earliest times to the
present day--whether in the shape of the doctrine of the inherently evil
nature of matter; of an Ahriman; of a hard and cruel Demiurge; of a
diabolical "prince of this world," show how widely this difficulty has been
felt.
Many seem to think that, when it is admitted that the ancient literature,
contained in our Bibles, has no more claim to infallibility than any other
ancient literature; when it is proved that the Israelites and their
Christian successors accepted a great many supernaturalistic theories and
legends which have no better foundation than those of heathenism, nothing
remains to be done but to throw the Bible aside as so much waste paper.
I have always opposed this opinion. It appears to {51} me that if there is
anybody more objectionable than the orthodox Bibliolater it is the
heterodox Philistine, who can discover in a literature which, in some
respects, has no superior, nothing but a subject for scoffing and an
occasion for the display of his conceited ignorance of the debt he owes to
former generations.
Twenty-two years ago I pleaded for the use of the Bible as an instrument of
popular education, and I venture to repeat what I then said:
"Consider the great historical fact that, for three centuries, this book
has been woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in English
history; that it has become the national epic of Britain and is as familiar
to gentle and simple, from John o' Groat's House to Land's End, as Dante
and Tasso once were to the Italians; that it is written in the noblest and
purest English and abounds in exquisite beauties of mere literary form;
and, finally, that it forbids the veriest hind, who never left his village,
to be ignorant of the existence of other countries and other civilisations
and of a great past, stretching back to the furthest limits of the oldest
nations in the world. By the study of what other book could children be so
much humanised and made to feel that each figure in that vast historical
procession fills, like themselves, but a momentary space in the interval
between the Eternities; and earns the blessings or the curses of all time,
according to its effort to do good and hate evil, even as they also are
earning their payment for their work?"[7]
{52}
At the same time, I laid stress upon the necessity of placing such
instruction in lay hands; in the hope and belief, that it would thus
gradually accommodate itself to the coming changes of opinion; that the
theology and the legend would drop more and more out of sight, while the
perennially interesting historical, literary, and ethical contents would
come more and more into view.
I may add yet another claim of the Bible to the respect and the attention
of a democratic age. Throughout the history of the western world, the
Scriptures, Jewish and Christian, have been the great instigators of revolt
against the worst forms of clerical and political despotism. The Bible has
been the _Magna Charta_ of the poor and of the oppressed; down to modern
times, no State has had a constitution in which the interests of the people
are so largely taken into account, in which the duties, so much more than
the privileges, of rulers are insisted upon, as that drawn up for Israel in
Deuteronomy and in Leviticus; nowhere is the fundamental truth that the
welfare of the State, in the long run, depends on the uprightness of the
citizen so strongly laid down. Assuredly, the Bible talks no trash about
the rights of man; but it insists on the equality of duties, on the liberty
to bring about that righteousness which is somewhat different from
struggling for "rights;" on the fraternity of taking thought for one's
neighbour as for oneself.
So far as such equality, liberty, and fraternity are included under the
democratic principles which assume the same names, the Bible is the most
{53} democratic book in the world. As such it began, through the heretical
sects, to undermine the clerico-political despotism of the middle ages,
almost as soon as it was formed, in the eleventh century; Pope and King had
as much as they could do to put down the Albigenses and the Waldenses in
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; the Lollards and the Hussites gave
them still more trouble in the fourteenth and fifteenth; from the sixteenth
century onward, the Protestant sects have favoured political freedom in
proportion to the degree in which they have refused to acknowledge any
ultimate authority save that of the Bible.
But the enormous influence which has thus been exerted by the Jewish and
Christian Scriptures has had no necessary connection with cosmogonies,
demonologies, and miraculous interferences. Their strength lies in their
appeals, not to the reason, but to the ethical sense. I do not say that
even the highest biblical ideal is exclusive of others or needs no
supplement. But I do believe that the human race is not yet, possibly may
never be, in a position to dispense with it.
* * * * *
{55}
I
THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF PALAEONTOLOGY
That application of the sciences of biology and geology, which is commonly
known as palaeontology, took its origin in the mind of the first person who,
finding something like a shell, or a bone, naturally embedded in gravel or
rock, indulged in speculations upon the nature of this thing which he had
dug out--this "fossil"--and upon the causes which had brought it into such
a position. In this rudimentary form, a high antiquity may safely be
ascribed to palaeontology, inasmuch as we know that, 500 years before the
Christian era, the philosophic doctrines of Xenophanes were influenced by
his observations upon the fossil remains exposed in the quarries of
Syracuse. From this time forth not only the philosophers, but the poets,
the historians, the geographers of antiquity occasionally refer to fossils;
and, after the revival of learning, lively controversies arose respecting
their real nature. But hardly more than two centuries have elapsed since
this fundamental problem was first exhaustively treated; it was only in the
last century that the archaeological value of fossils--their importance, I
mean, as records of the history of the earth--was fully {56} recognised;
the first adequate investigation of the fossil remains of any large group
of vertebrated animals is to be found in Cuvier's _Recherches sur les
Ossemens Fossiles_, completed in 1822; and, so modern is stratigraphical
palaeontology, that its founder, William Smith, lived to receive the just
recognition of his services by the award of the first Wollaston Medal in
1831.
But, although palaeontology is a comparatively youthful scientific
speciality, the mass of materials with which it has to deal is already
prodigious. In the last fifty years the number of known fossil remains of
invertebrated animals has been trebled or quadrupled. The work of
interpretation of vertebrate fossils, the foundations of which were so
solidly laid by Cuvier, was carried on, with wonderful vigour and success,
by Agassiz in Switzerland, by Von Meyer in Germany, and last, but not
least, by Owen in this country, while, in later years, a multitude of
workers have laboured in the same field. In many groups of the animal
kingdom the number of fossil forms already known is as great as that of the
existing species. In some cases it is much greater; and there are entire
orders of animals of the existence of which we should know nothing except
for the evidence afforded by fossil remains. With all this it may be safely
assumed that, at the present moment, we are not acquainted with a tithe of
the fossils which will sooner or later be discovered. If we may judge by
the profusion yielded within the last few years by the Tertiary formations
of North America, there seems to be no limit to the {57} multitude of
Mammalian remains to be expected from that continent; and analogy leads us
to expect similar riches in Eastern Asia, whenever the Tertiary formations
of that region are as carefully explored. Again, we have as yet almost
everything to learn respecting the terrestrial population of the Mesozoic
epoch--and it seems as if the Western territories of the United States were
about to prove as instructive in regard to this point as they have in
respect of tertiary life. My friend Professor Marsh informs me that, within
two years, remains of more than 160 distinct individuals of mammals,
belonging to twenty species and nine genera, have been found in a space not
larger than the floor of a good-sized room; while beds of the same age have
yielded 300 reptiles, varying in size from a length of 60 feet or 80 feet
to the dimensions of a rabbit.
The task which I have set myself to-night is to endeavour to lay before
you, as briefly as possible, a sketch of the successive steps by which our
present knowledge of the facts of palaeontology and of those conclusions
from them which are indisputable, has been attained; and I beg leave to
remind you, at the outset, that in attempting to sketch the progress of a
branch of knowledge to which innumerable labours have contributed, my
business is rather with generalisations than with details. It is my object
to mark the epochs of palaeontology, not to recount all the events of its
history.